Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to electronic access control devices that can be locked or unlocked remotely. More particularly, this disclosure relates to systems and methods for operating door locks using mobile devices.
Description of Related Art
The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Traditional door locks serve preventing unauthorized entrance to building or premises. The traditional locks are operated with keys such as conventional metal keys that are to be inserted within a keyhole to lift tumblers and allow the key to rotate within the lock to disengage a locking device. Other locks include keypads that require a manual entry of a code in order to disengage the locking device.
Electronic door locks recently became popular. In recent years, many of the electric lock on the market are “smart connected locks” which can be operated by communicating with a website or server that can remotely instruct the locks to lock or unlock upon receipt of a user command. For these ends, the electronic door locks are to be operatively connected to the Internet via a wireless local area network or other data networks. In practice, however, establishing data communication between the electronic door locks and servers are not always feasible. For example, a Wi-Fi network may fail to operate preventing the electronic door locks to connect to the server and perform locking or unlocking operation when needed. Thus, the electronic door locks may be vulnerable in view of the need of their connection to the wireless local area network.
The advantage of the locks connected to certain servers is to allow an administrator of a particular lock to dynamically allocate and revoke access rights for different individuals. The challenge, however, is to provide a device that could be added to a circuit of any regular and conventional electric door lock in order to make it a smart lock without the need to connect it to the Internet. The challenge is that this device needs to be able to communicate quickly and securely with mobile phones and execute specific instructions without the need of establishing a wireless connection between the device and the mobile phone. Yet additional challenge is that the administrator of the lock needs to still be able to dynamically allow and revoke access rights to users even though the device controlling the lock is not connected to the internet.